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| The Cover |
Ghost Fleet, by P.W. Singer and August Cole, is a
novel about a future war between the United States and China. In the vacuum left by the death of Tom Clancy,
authors have rushed in to fill the void with cutting edge military
thrillers. Ghost Fleet succeeds by using something that Clancy’s works had in spades...realism. It excels when it focuses on the world in
which the book takes place rather than the characters in the book. The book is set at an indeterminate date in
the near future. The Communist Party has
been swept away and replaced with an extremely meritocratic regime consisting
of business and military elite. This political
transition occurred after the Chinese people became fed up with the corruption
and ineffectiveness of the communist party.
Published in
2015, the book references contemporary events in China, such as a holographic Xi
Jinping expounding his Chinese Dream. Besides
referencing a two-child policy implemented by the new regime, nothing seriously
dates the book as of this point. Several interesting ideas make their way into
the novel. For example, an American
insurgency on the Chinese occupied Hawaiian Islands and the use of a space
laser to shoot down enemy satellites.
The most chilling aspect of the book is the Chinese military’s use of
hacking. The Chinese easily disable an
American military overly dependent on technology. The apathetic United States failed to prepare
for a war that the Chinese were clearly fighting before the first shots were
even fired. It just goes to show that
you can complain out intellectual property theft all you want, but at the end
of the day, what we’re really doing is arming and transferring technology to
enemies of the United States.
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| Iraq-Style Insurgency in Paradise |
I love the book’s
fearlessness in confronting how future technology will change what it means to
be human. We’ve reached a point where
technology can and will be implanted into the human body. Increasingly people will need to constantly
stay “connected” to be competitive for jobs, education, etc. I’ve noticed that many recent science fiction
movies and books side-step this issue. In
most films and books, technology is still something that you can just turn
off. In truth we never even turn off our
cellphones anymore, because we feel that we can’t be out of contact. What will life be like when they just implant
the functions of the phone into your brain?
I find it incredibly unsettling that people will begin getting
technology implanted into their bodies, and I think many other people do as
well. I tell myself that I’ll never do
it, no matter how common it becomes. The
true of the matter is that when others begin doing it and reaping the benefits,
such as faster access to information and interconnectivity, the rest of us will
likely have to adapt or die. In Ghost Fleet, many of the characters have
technological implants. What I found so
realistic about the implants in the novel was that there are multiple types of
implants serving different functions.
The book is ripe
for a film adaptation, but I don’t expect one anytime soon. With Chinese influence in America’s
entertainment industry growing, it’s unlikely any major studio would touch a
property that depicts a post-party China launching a preemptive attack on the
United States. Releasing that film would
make the studio the target of cyber attacks and quickly get the studio locked
out of the lucrative Chinese market.
Oh well, the
book is always better than the movie anyway.
